The Top 5 Things I Didn't Know About Pumpkins

5. There are a shit-ton of different kinds.

4. They require three cuts to sever them from their vines.

3. They turn orange in the shade/dark/deep in the weeds rather than in the sun.

2. There are a million of them in one little field.

1. Three people can pick about 800 pumpkins in 3 hours.

Am sore as hell. Am out of shape. Am a little embarrassed, but am getting over it. Am a city person, not a country person. Love organic veggies, to be delivered to me in a box rather than picking them from a field. Am very glad to be helping Anna and George with their harvest, though. Will power through.

The farm smells of compost and freshly cut hay. There is a dog, Roxy, who just had major surgery and walks like she's older than her 8 years. There are 5 cats, one of whom is lying next to me as I type. There are a bunch o' chickens and a couple of strutty roosters who keep their cock-a-doodles to a minimum, which is nice. They've been attacked by a raccoon or two recently, but then a baby monitor was put in the hen house so they know if something's going down. (Great idea, that.)

The house is the one where George grew up and his dad grew up here. His grandparents bought this house after the Halifax Explosion (a piece of the ship landed in their yard and scared the crap out of them, so they moved away -- George still has the piece of ship -- the kids used to take it to school for show and tell!) It is full of stuff and feels very homey. Our room has widewale hardwood floors that somehow don't creak when you walk on them. There are 4 bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs. All the windows are new.

From the window of our bedroom you can see the Bay of Fundy. There are farms across the street, up the hill, down the hill, and around the bend. The milk truck pulled into the farm across the street today and loaded up, I presume. Then he honked at us on his way back by our farm as we were toiling in the lower patch, Christy tramping around in the weeds, discovering pumpkins left and right, hiding in the brush. My Obama '08 t-shirt has been christened with the red mud of Nova Scotia.

We are headed to a garden shop place which apparently sells jams and jellies and chutneys and oils of a million varieties. Anna, George and Heather have been in making 11 batches of tofu since 4 a.m. and aren't quite done yet at almost 3 p.m. People work hard. Harder than I.

They could probably pick pumpkins without crippling themselves, too.